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Someone (I believe it was a comment in HN) recently said that the way we have incentivized corporations and have structured the regulations around them, corpora

by hliyan 5y ago

Someone (I believe it was a comment in HN) recently said that the way we have incentivized corporations and have structured the regulations around them, corporations have no choice but to behave as giant sociopaths.

dogma1138 5y ago
While I don’t know if regulations are to blame or what their contribution this is quite true. Corporate policies are all designed around one thing - reducing litigation risk, wellness, health and safety, “ethics”, inclusivity etc. training/policies are all designed to cover their asses rather than actually improve outcomes. Now whether this is purely an outcome of the regulatory landscape and how the legal system works or the outcome of simply natural selection for large entities regardless of the environment I don’t know. Anyone that ever was in a position of a people manager in any corporate entity even a relatively small one knows exactly just how poorly these policies are structured from an individual perspective. I manage people right now and if I see someone struggling whether it’s on a personal level or professional one my options are severely limited. If I have a direct report that is clearly struggling with some personal issues taking them out for a coffee and asking them about what is going on would pretty much be against company policies and could put my position and the company at risk. The best I could do is essentially send out a refresher on some mental health help line that the company uses anything else opens me to a liability.
- hliyan 5y ago
  Interesting. Last year I moved from a large corporation with well defined policies to a startup. The options you mentioned are fortunately very much on the table for me. If someone's struggling with something at home for example, I could literally send them some sort of help, within a reasonable budget of course. It's a win-win: they're happy, I'm happy and more often than not, it translates to higher motivation once the crisis is over. I'd hate to see those options be policified away one day.
  - dogma1138 5y ago
    It’s a win win when things don’t go wrong, the litigation environment means that anyone taking offense or claim that they have been discriminated poses a pretty big risk to a big enough company. It also assumes that managers are always competent enough and have sufficiently good soft skills to handle these sort of situations since involving HR is always “against the employee” as HR is there to protect the company. Unions might solve this issue but sadly unions aren’t immune to the same corruption that plagues any sufficiently large and political organization so the union becomes self serving rather than serving the employees. Some countries have better solutions like having an employee board in every company but in large corps these tend to be plagued by corruption as well.
yosamino 5y ago
Who is this "we" ? Are you trying to say Amazon is the victim here, having no other choice other than inflicting this dystopian nonsense on their workers ?
- throwaway3699 5y ago
  Amazon can't be a victim. It's an entity made of people. Although the end result is horrifying, I can totally see how certain incentives (including being several steps removed from warehouse workers) can turn otherwise decent people into bean counters.
- hliyan 5y ago
  I don't believe the author was presenting a moralist argument, but rather one interpretation of observations.
codeulike 5y ago
This is the gist of the 2003 documentary "The Corporation" - if corporations have the rights of legal 'persons', what sort of the 'persons' are they? The film attempts to compare the way corporations are systematically compelled to behave with what it claims are the DSM-IV's symptoms of psychopathy, e.g., the callous disregard for the feelings of other people, the incapacity to maintain human relationships, the reckless disregard for the safety of others, the deceitfulness (continual lying to deceive for profit), the incapacity to experience guilt, and the failure to conform to social norms and respect the law. edit: surprisingly positive review of the film in The Economist - https://www.economist.com/business/2004/05/06/the-lunatic-you-work-for https://www.economist.com/business/2004/05/06/the-lunatic-yo...
Jiejeing 5y ago
I don’t know the situation in the US well, could you point out one such regulation that would force a corporation to behave like a sociopath?
- lwhi 5y ago
  I believe it's lack of regulation that is actually at fault here.
- hliyan 5y ago
  Not the best example, but tax code. Rather than a flat % tax that all corporate entities must adhere to, there are thousands of pages of tax code, with hundreds of ways to 'optimize' hidden within them. A corporation would consider itself to be 'not doing the best it can', if it doesn't utilize (one may also read that as "exploit") those optimizations ("loopholes") while its competitors are doing so.
  - sundaeofshock 5y ago
    Most of those loopholes were created by lobbyists to expressly benefit their corporate masters. Corporations are active participants in the creation of the regulatory state. They are not victims here.
snthd 5y ago
related - https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/06/26/the-origin-of-the-worlds-dumbest-idea-milton-friedman/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/06/26/the-ori... >No popular idea ever has a single origin. But the idea that the sole purpose of a firm is to make money for its shareholders got going in a major way with an article by Milton Friedman in the New York Times on September 13, 1970.

by hliyan 5y ago

dogma1138 5y ago

While I don’t know if regulations are to blame or what their contribution this is quite true. Corporate policies are all designed around one thing - reducing litigation risk, wellness, health and safety, “ethics”, inclusivity etc. training/policies are all designed to cover their asses rather than actually improve outcomes. Now whether this is purely an outcome of the regulatory landscape and how the legal system works or the outcome of simply natural selection for large entities regardless of the environment I don’t know. Anyone that ever was in a position of a people manager in any corporate entity even a relatively small one knows exactly just how poorly these policies are structured from an individual perspective. I manage people right now and if I see someone struggling whether it’s on a personal level or professional one my options are severely limited. If I have a direct report that is clearly struggling with some personal issues taking them out for a coffee and asking them about what is going on would pretty much be against company policies and could put my position and the company at risk. The best I could do is essentially send out a refresher on some mental health help line that the company uses anything else opens me to a liability.

hliyan 5y ago
Interesting. Last year I moved from a large corporation with well defined policies to a startup. The options you mentioned are fortunately very much on the table for me. If someone's struggling with something at home for example, I could literally send them some sort of help, within a reasonable budget of course. It's a win-win: they're happy, I'm happy and more often than not, it translates to higher motivation once the crisis is over. I'd hate to see those options be policified away one day.
- dogma1138 5y ago
  It’s a win win when things don’t go wrong, the litigation environment means that anyone taking offense or claim that they have been discriminated poses a pretty big risk to a big enough company. It also assumes that managers are always competent enough and have sufficiently good soft skills to handle these sort of situations since involving HR is always “against the employee” as HR is there to protect the company. Unions might solve this issue but sadly unions aren’t immune to the same corruption that plagues any sufficiently large and political organization so the union becomes self serving rather than serving the employees. Some countries have better solutions like having an employee board in every company but in large corps these tend to be plagued by corruption as well.

yosamino 5y ago

Who is this "we" ? Are you trying to say Amazon is the victim here, having no other choice other than inflicting this dystopian nonsense on their workers ?

throwaway3699 5y ago
Amazon can't be a victim. It's an entity made of people. Although the end result is horrifying, I can totally see how certain incentives (including being several steps removed from warehouse workers) can turn otherwise decent people into bean counters.
hliyan 5y ago
I don't believe the author was presenting a moralist argument, but rather one interpretation of observations.

codeulike 5y ago

This is the gist of the 2003 documentary "The Corporation" - if corporations have the rights of legal 'persons', what sort of the 'persons' are they? The film attempts to compare the way corporations are systematically compelled to behave with what it claims are the DSM-IV's symptoms of psychopathy, e.g., the callous disregard for the feelings of other people, the incapacity to maintain human relationships, the reckless disregard for the safety of others, the deceitfulness (continual lying to deceive for profit), the incapacity to experience guilt, and the failure to conform to social norms and respect the law. edit: surprisingly positive review of the film in The Economist - https://www.economist.com/business/2004/05/06/the-lunatic-you-work-for https://www.economist.com/business/2004/05/06/the-lunatic-yo...

Jiejeing 5y ago

I don’t know the situation in the US well, could you point out one such regulation that would force a corporation to behave like a sociopath?

lwhi 5y ago
I believe it's lack of regulation that is actually at fault here.
hliyan 5y ago
Not the best example, but tax code. Rather than a flat % tax that all corporate entities must adhere to, there are thousands of pages of tax code, with hundreds of ways to 'optimize' hidden within them. A corporation would consider itself to be 'not doing the best it can', if it doesn't utilize (one may also read that as "exploit") those optimizations ("loopholes") while its competitors are doing so.
- sundaeofshock 5y ago
  Most of those loopholes were created by lobbyists to expressly benefit their corporate masters. Corporations are active participants in the creation of the regulatory state. They are not victims here.

snthd 5y ago

related - https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/06/26/the-origin-of-the-worlds-dumbest-idea-milton-friedman/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/06/26/the-ori... >No popular idea ever has a single origin. But the idea that the sole purpose of a firm is to make money for its shareholders got going in a major way with an article by Milton Friedman in the New York Times on September 13, 1970.